The History of Texas Instruments - Part One

You nominate one game, and you need to tell us the name of the game and the platform it was on. And it could be any platform. It could be an arcade game, it could be a PC, Mac, Xbox, PS three, Nintendo handheld console. It can be web based if you like. But just you let us know what the platform is so we can make sure we count that as the votes. So you can nominate your game either through email, which is text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or

you can nominate through Twitter or Facebook. And we're gonna put a cut off date on this. I want to have the episode go up by the end of September of eleven. So let's say you need to get your nominations in by September eleven, So if you get those nominations into us, we will make sure we include those in the process and we will have an episode where we give you the worst video games of all time based upon the votes of our listeners. Thanks a lot.

You can't wait to hear from you. Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poett and I am an editor of how stuff works dot com. Sitting and cross from me as always is senior writer Jarthans tickling you you didn't leave a bar of soap when you left me. You don't know that song. I'll introduce it to you afterwards. That's the very first line too, so that makes it very

easy to find that song. We're gonna start this off with a little Google Plus suggestion. This comes from Kyle who says you could do a podcast on the history of Texas instruments. You're right, Kyle, we could do that, and in fact we shall. Yes, this this was this is a challenge. You know. It's funny with all these um with all these different tech companies with the storied past, like we did with IBM, and now with Texas Instruments, um, you start looking in into their history and wow, yeah,

there's a lot to it. Yeah, especially when you know you can't just say, hey, the company started on this date and here's what they did, because it's a little more complicated than that. Yep. And um, I promised Jonathan a vocoder reference and he wasn't ready for this. Or actually it wasn't vocoder so much as it was auto tune. We did a podcast on auto tune some time ago,

and along with the technology for that. Uh. Texas Instruments also has a similar history because it began as an oil exploration company sort of using seismology in order to detect oil deposits. Yeah, yeah, this is really interesting. Let's

say cast our minds back to n UM. There was a company founded by several people, including one Eugene McDermott, and the company was called Geophysical Service Incorporated or g s I, and this company was specialized in using seismology, methodology and equipment in order to search for oil deposits. So this is a company that would go out survey an area attempt to find whether or not any oil maybe underneath that particular area, and then an oil drilling

company would come in and drill for that oil. Yeah. We talked about oil exploration technology and the UM in another podcast again UM, and this this also was I guess like an early version of the technology we talked about then, because what they would do, UM would be vibrate the the Earth's surface by setting off little explosions called shots. And then what they would do is record in time the sound waves that would reflect back in

order to get a good idea of where the oil was. Yeah, that would give the time between the impact of the explosion and the echo would give an indication of what the ground below what it was made of, because sound will travel at different rates through uh, different medium. Okay, yeah, the echo, Yes, the echo, Yes, the echoes. So yeah, this was back in which was sort of an auspicious time to be starting a new company. H That was back of course you might remember, Um, No, I don't,

I'm not that old, the Great Depression. No, I I just I didn't think it was that great. It's kind of a lousy depression. But they did file papers in New Jersey to incorporate the company Geophysical Service in May in May thirty, May sixteen, specifically, yeah, Well let's let's uh, we could talk more about what they did back then, but let's really get to the interesting part. So let's let's get ahead a little bit. Well, I was going to point out that, uh, just a couple little short,

little interesting facts. You know, Jonathan and I do tend to get off on these weird little tangents. Um, yeah, they're trying to hold onto Yep. There. They actually changed the name of the company in nineteen thirty nine to Coronando Corporation because their competitors were a little concerned that they might be withholding proprietary information and g s. I was, Uh, they had gotten into the business of exploring for oil themselves. Um, so they were licensing the technology and a an oil

company picked up Coronando Corporation. Um. The company actually ended up being Amaco, which I think is funny, just a weird. Isn't Cora Nando the name of an abba song? No, okay, I'm thinking of something else, yes, sorry, Um, well, I can't hear the drums. However, So Eugene McDermott was one of those founders. What he was joined by uh few other people including A Cecil H. Green and Jay Eric Johnson In nineteen forty one, they bought Geophysical Service Incorporated.

They purchased the company. Uh. Yeah, they bought it back from the oil company. I think the next day there was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yes, exactly. I do not suggest. I'm not suggesting in any way that there was any correlation between these two events. Yeah. They As a matter of fact, the quote from t I was that if the financing was not completed and in place with within ten days by Monday, December eighth, ninety one, the say would be terminated, our negotiations would be terminy.

That was actually the quote from their stuff. In. Yes, they're still doing the same thing that they were doing before. It is just now it's it's owned by new people. In they hire an electrical engineer, um Patrick Haggarty, and Haggarty has becomes the general manager of a division of Geophysical Service Incorporated called the Laboratory. Look I said laboratory.

I knew I was practicing, So I wouldn't say laboratory over and over the Laboratory and Manufacturing division, so or L and M he As a matter of fact, Uh, Haggarty had been a lieutenant in the UM I believe in the Navy a lieutenant you mean seriously, he was the procurement officer for the Magnetic Anomaly Detector project and that the m A D project was actually one of

uh DO physical services. Um I did say that, right, right? Yes, I keep thinking t I. That was there one of their contributions to the war effort here in the United States. So he was already working with the company from the military side, so he was already known to them. So he was working on the the M A D project, right, So he had mad skills. So next all right? Anyway, Yeah, he joins and L and M. That division starts to get lots and lots of business, mainly through military contracts.

Uh And in fact, it gets so much business that it starts to dwarf the exploratory business of G s I. So in nineteen fifty one, the owners and Haggardy all decided to restructure the company and last time. But L and M now becomes the major part of the company and G s I becomes a division within L and MS. So it's the old Switcher rou because before it was the the opposite, right, G s I was in charge and ellen M was a division. Now ln MS on top time. They renamed the company and they call it

General Instruments Incorporated. General Instruments Major. It was a major disaster. Actually, no, no, no, General Instruments. The problem. There was one problem, which was that there's another company I believe it was on the Eastern seaboard, and I think it was a defense contractor that already had that name. So they said, hey, we've got that name. You say, why are you so defensive? Right? So in nineteen wow, in ninety two, uh, the company undergoes a name change to Texas Instruments or t I

for short. I like that name. I think they should stick with it, yeah, and uh, fortunately so did they and they did so. Getting back to what they were working on before they became t I. But you know, it was essentially the same company that would become t I. Uh. Their their contracts included things like building up submarine detection equipment and uh and radar controlled bomb sites. So we're talking about some high tech stuff for the military right now.

That's really their main customer at this point. Uh. And you know, they had plenty of business because first there was the aftermath of World War Two, and then there was the Korean War, and so the war was keeping them going, but they knew that they had to diversify in order to become a successful company, and so they looked into various other industries they could start to make headway into so that they're not just a military defense contractor.

And one of those industries was the burgeoning vacuum tube industry. And we talked about vacuum tubes recently in our Theramin podcast, So if you want to learn more about vacuum tubes I recommend you you listen to that because they're actually we do a quick, down and dirty description of what

a vacuum tube is and what it does. But in Night something happened that really revolutionized the electronics industry, and at the time, not everyone saw it as a revolution, but it would turn out to be the big thing that would that would shape all electronics for that point forward. And that was a little invention from Bell Laboratories. You know what I'm talking about. Maybe it was the transistor.

I feel like we've touched on the transistor. We've talked about transistors a lot in this podcast, so you can find plenty of other episodes where we talked about what transistors are and what they do. But the the introduction of the transistor was a pretty big deal, although again not everyone recognized it as such because vacuum tubes did

the same thing as transistors. They look up more space, they gave off a lot more heat, but they were they were a proven technology, and the transistor was kind of a prototype and and no one really saw a way to make it practical from the the first introduction. It was more like a curiosity. Yeah, speaking of curiosity, if you're interested in learning specifically about transistors, we do have an article on the site too by Nathan Chandler

about how transistors work. Yes, and uh, if you want to. Well, the one person who did recognize that the transistor could be a big deal, besides the people in Bell laboratories, was Haggardy and so he wanted to pursue a license from Western Electric to get the Bell transistor. And at first their initial requests were denied. And that had to

do with a lot of different things. For one, Western Electric supposedly did not see t I as being capable of are actually at this point still uh general it was still g s I, but they didn't see g s I as being capable of producing transistors in a in a manufacturing process. So that was the first reason.

But there's also there's a complicated relationship with the US military where they're Western Electrics being told by one branch of the government, you need to keep the transistor under wraps because this information, if it got into the hands of unfriendly entities, could be very harmful for US. And then you had another part of the US government saying, you can't sit on this information. That's uh, anti competitive and it is hurting industry, so you've got to share it.

So they were kind of in a tough spot, but eventually they got clearance from the government. Western Electric did to license the technology of the transistor to any NATO country, any any company within a NATO country, and uh, well, Texas is in a NATO country because they still haven't declared their independence. So Texas Instrument immediately jumped on that opportunity and secured a license for the princely sum of twenty five thousand dollars, which was a lot of money.

In it's a lot of money right now. It's not as much though, but yes, and uh that was secured in nineteen fifty one. So then we've got the license that is going to give Texas Instrument its foundation for business for the foreseeable future. And j. Eric Johnson actually said this is a quote. Finally, we have purchased from the Western Electric Company a license under which we may

manufacture transistors and related semiconductor devices. The transistor is a very new development, primarily of Bell Telephone Laboratories, which promises to revolutionize electronics. It is in a general sort of way, a substitute for the vacuum tube. There is little question but the transistors and related devices will play an exceedingly important part in our future. That way very true, Yeah, yeah,

very very true. And in fact Bell Laboratories held a symposium about transistors because it was such a new technology that even people who were licensing it really had very little knowledge about what what they could do and how they were made. Yeah, they jumped right in n three, They were going gangbusters on trying to come up with

new technologies. Um, the Semiconductor Products Division was announced or was started in nineteen three, and they produced the first commercial silicon transistor in ninety four, also the first germanium high frequency transistor. They were they started and uh, you know right away, yeah, and it was. It was pretty interesting. I mean, like four of the people, well t I

sent four people to that symposium I had mentioned. One of them was was Haggardy UH and another was a fellow named Mark Shepard, who would later on become the head of Texas Instruments UM. And they actually watched a very very technical presentation from Bell Laboratories. Man I almost stood it again Bell Labs. They saw a very technical UH symposium and they synthesize that information, brought it back

and started to really work on things. They had to create a device called a crystal pullar because at the heart of the transistor is the earliest ones they were using was were germanium crystals. And in order to create the germanium crystals the the wafers that they would use as the foundation for these UH these transistors, they used

a crystal pullar. And what a crystal pullar is is essentially there's a there's a crucible where you melt germanium and then what you do is you insert a pure germanium crystal seed and you put that into the molten germanium mix, and you start rotating the seed and slowly withdrawing it from the mix. And you will start to create a crystal essentially like a crystal rod um, but it's a very exact process and also will have to introduce certain impurities into the mix in order to dope

the material. We've talked about doping semiconductors before, and if you haven't, if you're not familiar with that, you should probably listen to some of our other episodes. But in general, what makes a semi conductor or semiconductor is the doping process because a pure uh semiconductor would not really conduct electricity. That semiconductor is dope. Wow, we are just insane today anyway. Uh So, the crystal poller was a pretty cool thing.

You can actually find some neat illustrations and pictures online of these crystal pollers and and they're kind of medieval looking, fascinating though fascinating stuff. So, as Chris was saying, they started to introduce transistors. The first two they trend they introduced never really took off. It was the Type one and Type one. And the reason they never really took off is the Texas Instruments discovered there was a manufacturing problem and so they discontinued pretty quickly, like with it

less than a year after they had introduced them. But in nineteen fifty three, that's in September, they introduced types one oh two and one oh three. Now, what I find interesting about these two types of transistors, and we're not going to talk about every single transistor t I produced because that would that would take several podcasts easily. But types one O two and one oh three are interesting to me in particular because of a fellow named D. D.

Mac McBride. So McBride actually manufactured these transistors. He put them together by hand. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a time consuming process at all. Yeah, he would have to look through a microscope and lay out the transistor by hand. And uh, using this method, he could produce about thirty transistors every two days, so averaging fifteen a day. Not the most efficient process. Also, there was no guarantee that any two and sistors would have the exact same properties.

They might have very similar properties, but the crystal pulling technique was not so exact as to produce uh, perfect replicans. So yeah, you could have you would have a type one O two or a Type one oh three transistor. You might not necessarily have set out to make a one o two versus a one oh three. You were making a transistor, and then after you made it, you would test the transistor to see what properties it had, and then you would categorize it as either a one

o two or one oh three. It seems like they should come up with a process for making that faster and more reliable. Well, they did, but it took a while. Uh. They also they also experiment with other transistor materials. There was something called a grown junction transistor um and you know, they're mostly using germanium still at this point, but they did start to experiment with silicon. In fact, Texas Instruments

was one of the first companies to do that. Although there are disputes disputed reports about other companies that were working on it around the same time, possibly earlier. What isn't under any sort of dispute is that Texas Instrument launched the first commercial silicon based transistor. Texas Instruments did do that, although other companies were working on it at

the same time. Yeah, they did. They bought some silicon material from DuPont Um, the chemical giant, and grew a crystal from that apparently was ready to go on April fourteenth, ninety four UM and then they announced on May ten of that year the the availability of grown junction silicon transistors. And around around that same time you might be asking, Okay, well they're building all these transistors, who are they building them for? Well, that's that's kind of what Texas Instruments

had to ask. Because there was such a new technology, no one had really figured out how to incorporate it, uh and Texas Instruments had to take it upon itself to teach the world what the transistors could do and how they could be used, which to me actually reminds me of a lot of modern day electronics companies where they'll produce a new device that doesn't seemingly have a a space to fill, right, but show off the technology. Right.

But I'm thinking right now specifically of the iPad, because you have the iPad where it was this this device that doesn't really fill a gap, like there's not like a space in technology where you'd say, oh, I was missing this, and then the iPad came along and that fills that gap. It doesn't mean that the iPad is not useful, and it doesn't mean that it's not a great device. It just means that Apple had this uphill battle.

They had to prove that you want you there would be reasons to want one, and they did prove that and they were successful at it. Well. Texas Instrument had the same problem. They had to prove that the transistor was something you would want. And when I say you, I'm talking about other companies here, companies that produce other stuff, because Texas Instrument its customers were all other companies, not consumers. Uh. So, first they struck up a relationship with the Sauna Tone

Corporation making transistors for hearing aids. Yeah. But the problem, as I've mentioned before that hearing aids uh hearing aids need a very sort of precise uh electronic circuitry in order to work properly clearly in orders for the sound that you hear to be in the right range for human hearing. Otherwise, of course you're not really helping out. It's not hearing aid, it's a it's a hearing detriment.

So that was a challenge because, like I said, the transistors that they were producing didn't all have identical properties, so they'd have to play with those quite a bit in order to get it to work. Properly, but uh, they Haggard he saw the opportunity to go after the market by making something specific that would demonstrate the usefulness of transistors, and that was the transistor radio, Yes, the regency radio t R one, Yeah, which became a huge collectors item. And and that was I mean, it was

a pretty revolutionary product. Here we had a radio that used transistors in the in place of vacuum tubes more or less, which meant it was a much smaller product than the vacuum tube based radios. And uh, you know that it took a lot of work on on t A t I s part to build a transistor radio that had transistors with the right kind of frequencies to to actually pick up radio frequencies. It was it was a lot of of research and development that went into this.

Do you know how much they cost when they launched. I don't actually I didn't have that part and ninety cents, which Haggarty later said might have been a serious mistake because they had poured so much money. T I had poured so much money into research and development and manufacturing to create the the radio that it was a lot harder to recapture those expenses through the sale of the radio.

For one thing, I think they were building the radio as a proof of concept and didn't realize how popular it was going to be and that they could have charged more money and sold just as many units. Uh so they said that this actually haggard, He said, the facts are that at sixty dollars or sixty five dollars, it wouldn't have made an iota of difference, meaning that people would have bought it just as just as many.

And so that was one of t i's mistakes. In a way, it was incredibly successful, but they failed to capitalize on its success at the rate that they could have. Wow, well this is uh, it's funny. Twenty three minutes and we're still in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, we're gonna have to speed up. Uh yeah, well it's not gonna happen with nine because, um then we start talking about an

inventor who was on the payroll at Texas Instruments. But you know, there was an annual two week company wide vacation that everyone had, but well most people had, but new employees didn't. Uh, not that if they had an accrude vacation time. So somebody who was still putting around puttering around the office during this company wide vacation. Guy named Jack Kilby Jack st. Clair Kilby six ft six inches tall, eats redwoods for breakfast, bats left throws right now.

Kilby was a mountain of a man. Wait what anyway, six ft six inches tall, as much taller than I am. Well, yeah, I agree, but I just wasn't expecting that. Yeah he was. He was looking for a way to miniaturized circuits, and he figured out that a semiconductor, uh, would make things more cost effective. Yeah, a wafer semiconductor where you would build the circuit elements directly onto the wafer. Huh. Yeah,

it seems like a reasonably decent idea. Yeah. We call this this idea now the integrated circuit, and Kilby was the first person to produce such a circuit. It was a revel again, another revolutionary idea. So the transistor if if you call the transistor the basis of modern electronics, the integrated circuit fills a role in pretty much every electronic device you can think of. So modern day computers would not really exist without the integrated circuit, not not

as we know them now. Uh. Calculators video game consoles, microwaves, like tons of things out there rely on integrated circuits. Yeah, I believe the sketches that he made in his notebook survives still and t I UH with with their UH company somewhere. I'm pretty sure because there's actually a picture of him on the t I website holding up the notebook. He actually delivered a They had him wire up a circuit and bring it in, uh, you know, to demonstrate,

and he did that in August. They said, yeah, okay, it looks like it will work. Go ahead and put it together. You know, let's let's make a few of these and see what happens. Yea, And yeah, he demonstrated it, uh demonstrated actually working on September twelve, and apparently he he has said after that he said that, um, he would have prettied it up a little if he had known that that was going to be held up as

the first integrated circuit. He kind of, you know, as an engineer, he was building something that would work first. So it's not the U not the most elegant design, but it not at least from an esthetic point of view, but from an actual engineering point of view, it's remarkable. Oh, absolutely absolutely, and he would be honored many many, many, many many times. Yes, um And around this time, it's interesting,

you see some other stuff that was going on. Right around the same time that the integrated circuits being developed. Uh t I landed some major supply contracts with another company that we've mentioned before, um at IBM, which was a big deal. And also uh t I tried to show the the well the potential for a transistor based

portable television. They actually went out bought a portable TV that existed using vacuum tubes, stripped it out, rebuilt it using transistors, and demonstrated it, although the television manufacturers didn't really jump on board with that because they didn't think that the world was ready for such a thing. Yeah, and now are a brief episode out of our show within a show stuff what goes Beep? October four, nine seven.

Of course, sput Nick was launched into space, but in nineteen eight, uh the United States launched Explore one, which had t I transistors on board to help it go deep and discover the magnetic radiation belt around the Earth. That's all it did. Yeah, no, no big whoop, right, but it was only doing science in space. Good stuff. Yeah, so I think, well, we're coming up on what twenty eight minutes now, Yeah, we're coming up on twenty eight minutes, and we've got a ton of stuff to talk about.

I think I think we do apart one and A part two. How about you? Okay? Yeah, I'm okay with that. All right? Cool, So we're gonna we're gonna stop here in It's ninety eight, isn't it. I think so? All right, So we're gonna stop in nineteen fifty eight and we will pick up when we left off in our next episode, Texas Instruments Part two. So guys, uh, if you want to hear more about other companies, you know, we've talked about IBM, and we've talked about Texas Instruments, and we're

gonna continue to do that. If you want to hear about other companies, let us know. You can send us an email. That address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. Our handle at both of those is text Stuff each sw and Chris and I will have to again about Texas Instruments really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.

Join How Stuff Work staff, As we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow, The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you